In retrospect, Nadine Hubbs’s keynote address for the 2017 IASPM-US annual meeting seems almost prescient. Its title, “Country Music in Dangerous Times,” reflected the sense of crisis progressives felt in the wake of Donald Trump’s election four months earlier, and its central concerns presaged the fatal racist violence that would erupt at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville six months later. In response to the intensifying racial and class polarization in American life at that moment, Hubbs issued an urgent call to recuperate the legacy of post-Civil Rights working-class progressivism by listening more closely to country music’s anti-bourgeois dissenters.

The address builds on one of the central arguments of Hubbs’s influential book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. In that work, she showed how the dominant culture’s longtime depiction of the working class as a bastion of queer-loving sexual deviance had been replaced by the contemporary image of retrograde working-class homo- and transphobia. Despite their contradictions, both constructions use the purported aberrance of working-class attitudes toward sexuality to legitimate middle-class dominance.

A similar logic, she argued in her keynote, can be applied to understandings of working-class attitudes toward race. By reading a handful of pivotal moments in the hard country of the “long seventies,” Hubbs recovers the elements of working-class culture that have historically rejected white racial solidarity to embrace “identifications within and across society’s margins: between racial, carceral, and sexual minorities and various poor and working-class folk.” Johnny Cash’s prison recordings, David Allan Coe’s “Fuck Aneta Briyant,” Merle Haggard’s “Irma Jackson,” and Johnny Paycheck’s “Colorado Kool-Aid,” she asserts, contribute to a robust chorus of voices in country music that “scorn dominant power and identify with marginal positions beyond their own.”

While “Country Music in Dangerous Times” certainly responded to its political moment, Hubbs’s critical analysis of class cultural conflict and her reclamation of white working-class tolerance and progressivism seem, if anything, more necessary now than they did in 2017.

Diane Pecknold

University of Louisville

Since finishing Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music a few years ago I have written several essays in further pursuit of answers to questions raised in the book.1 One set of questions I continue to think about concerns my argument that the American working class flipped from its position as “queer hotbed” throughout most of the twentieth century to become a “queer deathbed” in the post–civil rights period. Notably, this is a period that has seen the rise of social tolerance as cultural capital. Indeed, present goings-on suggest to me that the politics of social tolerance has merged with, and at times usurps, the role of taste as cultural capital in Pierre Bourdieu’s class-formation schema. In this context, country music, in all its associations with the stigmatized white working class, can be a dangerous taste. Hence the well-known phrase, one that has gained only more currency in recent years: “Anything but country.”2

Using Outlaw country star David Allan Coe’s self-released 1978 underground track “Fuck Aneta Briant” and more recent songs by artists including the lesbian country star Chely Wright, I argued in Rednecks that post-1970s America witnessed the emergence of both a “middle-classing of the queer” and its complement, the now-familiar trope of the working-class homophobe. I showed how the new associations giving rise to these paired formations reversed those that had prevailed for homosexuality’s first 100 years, when working-class people both white and black were pathologized—socially and institutionally—as queer lovers, not haters, and aversion to homosexual “deviance” was a pillar of middle-class respectability. In forthcoming work I’ll elaborate on this argument and propose some explanations of how the working class became markedly homophobic in the post–civil rights era: whether in reality, or in the minds of the middle class—or through some combination of the two.3

David Allan Coe has never identified as gay. But throughout his songs and public self-representations he has identified under other stigmatized labels, including those of redneck, ex-con, and—to quote a term of hate speech—“white trash.” In “Fuck Aneta Briant” Coe assumes an inside perspective in his defense of the queer, invoking the words queer and faggot as if he had some personal insight on those positions. His words mark out boundaries between Us and Them—but they’re not the boundaries a contemporary dominant-culture reading would likely assume. Coe’s “faggot,” “queer,” and “goddamn homosex’als” did not erect a barrier between a conservative, white working-class country listener and a feared and hated queer other. Rather, his language flouted the middle class and its prettifying euphemisms—including the genteel language of Anita Bryant. The most virulent homophobe in American history always used the polite term homosexual.

Coe’s rhetoric asserted his place among society’s outcasts. This is registered in the lyric via intimate familiarity with the queer and cross-marginal solidarity linking the queer to the redneck, to “white trash,” and to the outlaw and ex-con. Such alliances hark back to a twentieth-century social logic that’s mostly forgotten now, just a few decades into the middle-classing of the queer. I hear “Fuck Aneta Briant” as simultaneously anti-bourgeois and anti-homophobic. But Coe’s vulgar, anti-euphemistic lyrics can confuse middle-class hearings. These factors, in combination with Coe’s social identity as a redneck and “white trash,” can even lead some twenty-first–century listeners to interpret the song as homophobic.

In our time, the stigma of homo- and transphobia clings to the working class and its cultural emblems like country music. By contrast, a beloved alternative rock band may publicly perform homophobia, and broadcast it widely via YouTube, and still not be marked as homophobic. Foo Fighters proved this in 2011 with their mock-gay ditty “Keep It Clean.” When the band performed the faux-country song in Kansas City as pseudo-queer provocation to members of Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church—poised across the street with their “God Hates Fags” signs—Huffington Post, the Advocate, and dozens of other media outlets declared Foo Fighters brave champions of LGBT politics. Apparently, when rocker guys assemble enough country-prole mockery—twangy guitar, phony drawl, hillbilly-trucker get-up—and point it at loony bigots from flyover country, it conjures a straight-boy magic transforming gay travesty into queer freedom fighting.

Fan comments on YouTube were positively euphoric—but not all of them. The commenter truckdawg43 complained that he would have liked to share in the collective anti-Westboro glee but was prevented by Foo Fighters’ tactics of caricature and judgment of “poor simple . . . rural folk.”

His post dropped into the sea of bubbly comments like a lead assclown. But truckdawg43 had a point: Foo Fighters’ ascent as anti-homophobic heroes was enabled by other peoples’ descent as homophobic bigots. Constructing your progressivism by rehearsing stereotypes of rural working-class homophobes leaves no room for actual rural and working-class people to join in progressive anti-homophobia.

We see many instances of representation like Foo Fighters’—and like this one.

These kinds of stereotyping and aggression spur little questioning or analysis in the dominant culture. Perhaps this should not surprise us, for not only is middle-class people’s familiarity with working-class people increasingly rare, but their privileged position in the class structure depends on differentiation and devaluation of the working-class other. The first task in claiming a middle-class self and the life-altering privilege that comes with it is not to be working class. American exceptionalism and its denials notwithstanding, our late-capitalist social and economic structure differentiates working and middle classes and positions them antagonistically. And middle-class identities are defined in terms of a distinguished individualism that is constructed precisely by distinction from the working-class “masses.”

In short, middle-class power and privilege stand upon the continual, daily deprecation of working-class existence. Country music is an audible emblem of that existence and is instrumental in the self-valuing, other-devaluing contests of class formation. This is true from both sides: just as middle-class-identified subjects devalue country and the working-class people, style, and lifeways it represents, working-class-identified country creators and audiences use the music to criticize middle-class people, values, and dominance, particularly in the hard-country genre of the anti-bourgeois song. Of course, the social effects of this mutual antagonism are asymmetrical: even the harshest digs in an anti-bourgeois song like “Redneck Woman” do not successfully depreciate the middle class. In the dominant culture, middle-class properties define what is valuable, and working-class critiques have little resonance beyond their own low-status domains.

But what are the effects of ubiquitous, authoritative representations of working-class bigotry on working-class people?

One of the most influential political commentaries of the century so far, Frank (2004) argues that the U.S. working class so oppose gun control, abortion, gays, and racial minorities that they vote Republican against their own economic interests.

While writing and researching Rednecks, I came more and more to wonder where U.S. dominant culture might afford any space for representations of white working-class social tolerance and progressivism. And if the answer is “nowhere,” what does that mean for working-class people—or for middle-class people? What does it mean for American society overall?

LESSONS OF THE PAST: MARGINAL ALLIANCES AND COUNTRY’S LONG SEVENTIES

To approach these questions, I’ll recall a pivotal period that I call the “long seventies” in country music.4 Forty-eight years ago today, in 1969, Johnny Cash recorded his album At San Quentin.As Daniel Geary has argued, Cash’s multi-chart–topping live prison albums (starting with At Folsom Prison in 1968) “are significant and under-recognized social statements of the 1960s” in which the artist “encouraged his listeners to empathize with prisoners.” Cash “performed before a multiracial audience,” Geary noted, and his “albums and his prison reform activism rejected the law-and-order policies of conservative politicians who sought to enlist country music in their cause.”5

Cash’s prison albums were phenomenally successful and dominated international album charts in 1968 and 1969 with their progressive, anti-establishment politics front and center. Geary concludes that the albums challenge the prevalent notion “that country music provided the soundtrack for the white conservative backlash of the late 1960s.” Indeed, as Diane Pecknold has shown, it wasn’t so much that country went right as the right went country.6 Middle-class migrants to the suburbanizing Sunbelt South latched onto songs they heard in line with their conservative views, and some became newbie country fans. Nixon seized country opportunistically, declaring it the music of his “silent majority” and inviting artists like Cash and Merle Haggard to the White House.7

And yet, in the public imagination, country music became associated with conservative politics in that late-sixties moment, and since then the idea has only hardened. Likewise the social group most associated with country music, then and now: the white working class. Indeed, in the years following the civil rights struggles and social change of the late sixties and early seventies, the white working class has become associated with conservative and reactionary politics to such a totalizing degree that in liberal-progressive discourse, stories of conservatism and, especially, intolerance are stories in search of a white-working-class explanation. Today, mention of the white working class evokes nothing so much as conservatism and bigotry. And country music serves as sonic signal of all that: conservatism, bigotry, and the white working class—for non-fans and outsiders, at least. Hence the formulaic response to queries of one’s musical taste: “I’ll listen to anything but country.” Research shows that this declaration is a symbolic social rejection of the group for which country figures as proxy: the white working class.8

The country song most famously associated with late-sixties backlash conservatism is Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (#1 1969). Haggard claimed his narrator—a white, male, Christian, war and flag-hugging, hippie-, weed-, and orgy-hating “square”—was a portrait of a certain small-town type of the era. But “Okie” drew thousands of new “demi-redneck” and “faux bubba” fans.9 They heard Haggard’s performance without irony or distance and embraced the song mightily. Some people incorrectly read Haggard’s appearance at the Nixon White House a few years later as an endorsement and indicator of his partisan affiliation.10

In those days record companies, in Nashville as in Motown, sought to re-capitalize on a hit single through a related or copycat follow-up. When Capitol Records approached Haggard in this vein he proposed the ultimate “Okie” antidote: “Irma Jackson.” Predictably, Haggard’s label passed on this suggestion, and his self-penned song of interracial love was quietly released a few years later (in 1972) as an album track. We’ll never know what might have happened had “Irma Jackson” been Haggard’s follow-up single. We do know that Janis Ian encountered resistance on releasing her interracial single “Society’s Child” to pop radio in 1966. And it’s easy to imagine country radio and fans, not only in the South, censoring or even reacting violently to Haggard’s song circa 1969.

Even so, “Irma Jackson” would have been timely and relevant for some country fans. Just two years before “Okie from Muskogee,” Caroline County, Virginia, natives Richard and Mildred (Jeter) Loving had made history with their Supreme Court victory for interracial marriage. The couple had come together in the late fifties in part through the country music—popularly known as “hillbilly” music—that Mildred’s brothers played. Like many country fans then, the Lovings were rural working folk. They enjoyed car races and the string band music that was still shared interracially in their region, some 25 years after the dawning American music industry segregated (as Karl Hagstrom Miller put it11) southern working-class sounds into the racialized marketing categories of “old time” and “race” music, respectively. For decades the tangled, “twisted roots” (in Nick Tosches’s phrase12) of R&B and country continued to send up telltale shoots, in multiple directions. And today the African American string band is being revived by groups like the Ebony Hillbillies and Carolina Chocolate Drops.

It seems very possible that Haggard might have had Mildred Jeter in mind when he wrote “Irma Jackson”; Grey Villet’s moving photo essay on the Lovings had appeared in LIFE magazine in 1966. Besides wondering what might have happened had Haggard released his interracial love song as a single, I wonder what might have happened, or could still happen, if Richard and Mildred—in all their luminous love, courageous sacrifice, and progressive struggle—were remembered and celebrated expressly as working-class people. Jeff Nichols’s recent film Loving depicts them as working folk, but for purposes of racial, social, and economic progress in the current moment, the fiftieth anniversary of their historic legal victory, I would like to name them as working class. Explicitly naming the Lovings as working-class progressive heroes could counter prevailing stereotypes of working-class backwardness and bigotry and give a truer picture of the history and diversity of the American working class (whose overrepresentation as white, male, and straight I aim to address in my next project, Country Mexicans). The Lovings can remind us that working-class people have long histories in social margins that they have shared with gender, sexual, and racial others.13

Indeed, past stereotypes in the dominant culture often damningly linked poor and working-class people to mixed-race intimacies, as to queerness: both registered as “deviance” under authoritative middle-class lenses. Contemporary cultural images often place interracial relations in a frame of middle-class tolerance. But the older associations linger on, as the German-American model Heidi Klum and British R&B and soul singer Seal illustrated in 2009. The couple renewed their marriage vows in Malibu in what the press called a “‘white trash’ wedding.” It presented the carefully crafted spectacle of a black groom standing at the altar with his white bride, pregnant in a low-cut sequined jumpsuit and wearing blue eye shadow and cornrows. By their own account, the couple sought to make themselves “tacky.” Notably, some of the slyest elements in their performance of “white trash” tackiness were interracial signifiers. Middle-class judgment has long been especially harsh toward poor white styles emulating or identifying with African American styles—and so, Klum’s “tacky” cornrows were the crowning glory of her “white trash wedding.”14

PRESENT AND FUTURE: DANGER AND DIRECTIVE

The long seventies was a defining period for current understandings of country music and white working-class politics as conservative and retrograde. But I have cited several cultural instances, including some country songs, that challenge and complicate the prevalent narrative. I want to bring in one more country track from this era. In “Colorado Kool-Aid” (#50 1978), the white singer Johnny Paycheck spun a gruesomely funny David and Goliath tale about the deft victory of the narrator’s “little Mexican . . . buddy” over a colossal bully in a bar fight.

Paycheck’s song, along with the Coe, Cash, and Haggard songs already cited, served within its original country music audiences to suggest identifications within and across society’s margins: between racial, carceral, and sexual minorities and various poor and working-class folk.15 In mainstream perspective today, however, such linkages are unexpected and even unimaginable. When I play country music for academic audiences, they are often taken aback on hearing Mexican, African American, or queer representations. Many perceive bigotry from the first appearance of a marginalized figure, even when they’re unclear about the song’s lyrics, its meaning, or its themes and vignette. Often, listeners express wariness and concern about the very combination of subject matter and medium: to their minds, country music and racial and sexual minorities don’t mix. They stiffen, expecting to hear something offensive. Such responses point to current notions about who can treat and be trusted with—in essence, who owns—discourse that falls under the contemporary aegis of diversity.

In his study The Color of Class, Kirby Moss homes in on poor whites in order to highlight the multiplicity of forms of whiteness and thus denaturalize race. By examining poor whites’ marginal experiences of whiteness, Moss, an African American anthropologist, challenges George Lipsitz and other scholars’ “normalized notions of Whiteness . . . as an ‘unmarked category against which difference is constructed.’” Moss thus challenges the middle classness implicitly assumed by prominent theoretical models of normalized, unmarked whiteness. He analyzes the label poor whites as a “discursive anomaly” because it refers to “a group who, rather than identify or be identified with forms of poverty, identifies instead with forms of privilege because they see themselves in Whiteness and all of its promise.”16 Poor whites, in other words, disidentify from the “poor” part and seek to capitalize on the “white” part of an identity that Moss’s white interlocutors, rich and poor alike, effectively understand as a contradiction in terms (and so, a sign of individual failure).

The intricacies of race, class, privilege, and identification among low-income and low-status whites in the United States have inspired a fascinating historiography, one example of which is Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness (1998). Hale writes of the “invention of the color line” during the Civil War and the need for the southern white ownership class to build alliances with poor whites. The strategy of the white owners was to emphasize their racial sameness with impoverished whites. In this pivotal moment and others—including episodes of interracial labor organizing17—privileged whites sought to protect their wealth and power by encouraging struggling poor whites to identify with racial sameness and ignore socioeconomic difference—the poverty and abject, exploited status that connected them to poor blacks.

Hale’s history readily links to Moss’s theoretical scenario, in which contemporary poor whites identify with racial privilege over socioeconomic lack. Undoubtedly Moss’s analysis applies in very many instances. It does not, however, describe a stable or uniform state. For white elites never entirely succeeded in securing poor whites’ identifications or allegiances. And country music, though viewed since the seventies as a bastion of conservatism and intolerance, has regularly given voice to the ambivalence, resentment, and anger surrounding this fact, all the way up to today.18

Songs like “Colorado Kool-Aid” and “Fuck Aneta Briant” can disgust and bewilder middle-class listeners who keep their distance from working-class style and sentiment. The very presence of a drawling voice singing words like queer or Mexican against a musical backdrop of fiddle or weeping pedal steel may register viscerally as conservative, reactionary, or bigoted. But Coe, Cash, Haggard, and Paycheck in my hard-country examples scorn dominant power and identify with marginal positions beyond their own. Recognizing the anti-hegemonic and cross-marginal coalitional identifications at the center of these country songs, and others like them, represents a turn away from prevailing understandings of country music and working-class politics. Such a turn could be crucial in our moment.

We’re living in a time of galloping global and American inequality. And unequal times are dangerous times. As the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has noted, “When the rich capture politics, they mainly use their influence to limit competition from below and extract rents from everyone else.” “Extreme wealth inequality,” she warns, “leads to the de facto control of government by the rich (plutocracy), and so is incompatible with democracy.”19

Our dangerous times create a critical need to recognize the shared interests and stakes among middle- and working-class people. Ninety-nine percent of the humans on this planet are rapidly losing ground to the One Percent; we’ll surely need to join forces if we are to have any chance of stopping, or even slowing down, the process. To achieve this, the middle class, particularly the white middle class, will have to check its habitual dependence on the working class as foil for its privilege. The current, dangerous moment calls on us to let go of comfortable fictions that place inordinate blame for society’s ills on its most marginalized, least influential members.20 It calls on us, too, to leave space for a persona that’s culturally positioned as an impossible oxymoron—the white working-class progressive—and to come to grips with why middle-class people should want to do so. I see compelling reasons in social justice and in mutual survival.

The author at the post-inaugural Women’s March in Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 21, 2017.

Finally, I would emphasize that this task requires the skills and energies of artists, scholars, and critics of culture. Because some of our greatest challenges today present as differences of representation, style, and taste.

Notes

Nadine Hubbs, Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); “Country Music, the Queer, and the Redneck,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 66.3 (2013): 852–56; “‘Jolene,’ Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton’s Loving Address of the Other Woman,” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19 (2015): 71–76; “The Promised Land: Springsteen’s Epic Heterosexuality, Late Capitalism, and Prospects for Queer Life,” William I. Wolff, ed., Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Essays on Rhetoric, Social Consciousness, and Contemporary Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017): 90–104; “‘Them’s My Kind of People’: Cross-Marginal Solidarity in Country Music of the Long Seventies,” in Mark A. Jackson, ed., The Honky Tonk on the Left: Progressive Thought in Country Music (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, in press 2018).

Nadine Hubbs, “How the Working Class (Supposedly) Became Homophobic: Antibourgeois Country Music and the Middle-Classing of the Queer,” in Ian Peddie, ed., The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music and Social Class (London: Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming 2019).

The cultural anthropologist John Hartigan has theorized redneck, hillbilly, and white trash as stigmatized categories of whiteness. When Richard Loving married Mildred Jeter and had children with her, he occupied this marginal space of marked whiteness, which first endangers and then, once cast out to the margins, helps to define and reinforce white privilege by its spectacular exclusion: John Hartigan Jr., “Who Are These White People? ‘Rednecks,’ ‘Hillbillies,’ and ‘White Trash’ as Marked Racial Subjects,” in Ashley W. Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, eds., White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, 95–111 (New York: Routledge, 2003).

The preceding three paragraphs are substantively similar to material included in Hubbs, “Them’s My Kind of People.” The essay further develops my notion of the long seventies and my argument concerning cross-marginal identifications in country music of the period.

Ibram X. Kendi provides a model in his National Book Award winner, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation, 2016). Kendi’s analysis locates the historical origins of American racism in policies created by the powerful to perpetuate their own interests and views racist ideas as aftereffects, devised to justify the resulting oppression and power imbalances.